| Photo: Karen Laventure (Shutterstock) |
All of us know the feeling when something awful occurs in the day and we simply can not sleep at night. It turns out that, like people, dogs’ sleep has been affected by poor experiences — however, the effects aren’t quite exactly the same.
While individuals take longer to fall asleep after a lousy day, the dogs fell asleep more quickly after a bad experience than following a good one. This is thought to be a protective reaction to stress. But, like people, dogs didn’t sleep as well after the bad experience, showing their sleep was disturbed.
16 pet dogs participate in the analysis, which took place over 3 phases. The initial session was a clinic one so the dogs could become accustomed to the equipment and being at the lab. In the subsequent two sessions, the puppies had a bad or good experience, followed by 3 hours of sleep. Half of the dogs had the great experience initially followed by the bad experience, and half the puppies had the bad experience followed by good. At least 5 times elapsed between these two visits to the lab.
The great experience was 6 minutes where the puppy was petted every time it moved to the owner, was spoken to well, and played tug or fetch depending which it favored.
The bad experience additionally lasted 6 minutes and also began with the puppy using their leash tied to the wall and have been left alone in the room. After 2 minutes, the owner came back in and dismissed the puppy, but did go stand near it. Then an experimenter arrived and approached the puppy in a threatening way prior to quitting, sitting on the floor, and looking at the puppy for 3 minutes without reacting to it.
After the good or bad experience, the puppy was taken to a different room and ready for the sleep measurements. It took approximately 10 minutes to set on the electrodes for the EEG recordings, and it was achieved in a way reasonably consistent with all the good or bad experience the dog had just had. So the puppy got plenty of petting and pleasant talk while it occurred, or even the experimenter dismissed the puppy as far as they can throughout the process.
During the three hours following the bad experience, the puppies got a mean of 72 minutes sleep and also the duration of a sleep cycle was 56 minutes. After the great experience, the puppies took longer to go to bed, and on average they got 65 minutes sleep with a sleep cycle of 51 minutes.
The different phases of sleep were additionally affected by the puppies’ experiences. After the adverse experience, dogs had a longer duration of REM sleep, that is characterized by rapid eye movements (thus the title). The researchers also had predicted a change in the total amount of REM sleep because it has been associated with emotional processing.
Non-REM sleep was high following the positive experiences. This is when the deepest sleep occurs, so after adverse experiences the puppies got less heavy sleep.
The investigators also found that the puppies’ personalities were connected to how they collaborated together with the proprietor. For example, dogs which were rated as more agreeable and less open hid behind their owner when the experimenter was sitting and considering them at the adverse experience. In turn, a few of the behaviour differences were connected to fluctuations during the sleep cycle.
What this means is that individual differences in how the dogs reacted to the experiences were revealed in changes in their sleep. The scientists suggest further study on this issue, and on connections between welfare and sleep in puppies.
This is the very first time that bad or good experiences are demonstrated to affect how well a puppy sleeps.
The newspaper will be open access and you can read it through the link below.
Reference
Kis, A., Gergely, A., Galambos, Á., Abdai, J., Gombos, F., Bódizs, R., and Topál, J. (2017, October). Sleep macrostructure is modulated by negative and positive social knowledge in mature pet puppies. In Proc. R. Soc. B (Vol. 284, No. 1865, p. 20171883). The Royal Society. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.1883
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source http://www.thedogcouch.com/companion-animal-psychology-dogs-sleep-immediately-following-a-stressful-experience/
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